Beatles News
While creative differences, the strain of stardom and John Lennon's girlfriend Yoko Ono have all been blamed for the Fab Four's break-up, the documents reveal the numerous convoluted legal battles that also weighed on the band.
The documents, which were discovered in a cupboard where they had been stored since the 1970s, include copies of The Beatles advisor's minutes of meetings, legal writs and a copy of the band's 1967 Original Deed of Partnership.
They show that after manager Brian Epstein died in 1967, the band realised that money was unaccounted for and that they were being pursued by tax authorities.
Another damaging legal battle erupted when Paul McCartney opposed the decision by other band members to hire Allen Klein as their new manager.
The uncovered stash of files document the subsequent 1970 High Court battle launched by McCartney against the band in London, which exposed Klein's mismanagement.
"It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the actual complexity of the various legal arrangements which have been entered into by Messrs. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starkey (Ringo Starr)," said notes on one document.
Other legal difficulties besetting the band included deciding when Pete Best left the group and Ringo Starr joined, royalties for film and music rights and Klein's inability to produce accounts for the tax authorities.
"Even though John, Paul, George, and Ringo had grown tired of being The Beatles and wanted to record and perform as individual artists, this must have been a difficult time for each of them," said Denise Kelly, head of Dawsons Entertainment and Popular Culture department.
Source: france24.com
John Lennon and Yoko Ono were not just a power couple because of their undeniable impact on music history. The couple were also dedicated activists and key players in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. And this did not sit too well with the political powers at the time.
Their only son, Sean Ono Lennon, recently sat with PEOPLE to debut the reissue of his father’s album Mind Games, along with a multimedia box set that includes song remixes, reproductions of art pieces made by Lennon and Ono, posters, postcards, and much more. But Ono Lennon also took the time to share important details about his iconic parents’ relationship, including the trying moments where President Nixon wanted them deported. John Lennon and Yoko Ono had the State Department on edge.
Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon to stage a “bed-in” protest in the Netherlands. They also recorded their iconic anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance” during a similar protest held in Montreal. This, among other anti-war gems like “Merry Xmas (The War is Over)”, was evidently powerful enough to have then-President Nixon threatened, especially as both Lennon and Ono were relentless in their activism. Furthermore, the power couple had billboards put up all around the world that read: “War is Over! If You Want It!”
Following all of this, the Nixon administration began to attempt to get Lennon deported from the United States. The President decided to send the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) after one of The Beatles on a phony drug charge. Nixon’s administration’s petty justification for Lennon’s intended deportation was a marijuana-related misdemeanor charge the musician had gotten in England over five years prior.
Source: Demi Phillips/wegotthiscovered.com
John Lennon never pretended to have all the answers. While he put himself in the limelight at times for his political views, it was generally in the guise of someone who was posing opinions and beliefs that questioned the status quo, not as someone with definitive solutions.
He also displayed inquisitiveness when it came to his own life. From his 1971 album Imagine, the song “How?” finds him practically paralyzed by questions about his potential path forward that he can’t seem to answer.
If you just listened to the sound alone of John Lennon’s first two solo albums, you might think he’d undergone a drastic change in attitude in the year that separated their releases. But the different musical tone of the records had more to do with what Lennon wanted out of those two records.
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, which he released in 1970, was extremely stark from a musical standpoint. He recorded most of the songs with a trio, and he often screamed out the lyrics. This was in response to the “primal scream” therapy he was undergoing at the time.
By contrast, Imagine, released in 1971, arrived sounding much lusher and more produced. The record was also full of sweet melodies. But that benign feel didn’t often translate to the lyrics. Songs like “Crippled Inside” and “Jealous Guy” were quite catchy, but the sentiment of the lyrics was often just as raw as what appeared on the first record.
Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com
Paul McCartney has given fans insight into how he wrote many of his most famous songs. He said he wrote The Beatles’ “Yesterday” because of magic and a dream. The cute Beatle felt the tune could not be explained in purely natural terms.
Paul McCartney had no idea how he came up with the tune for The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’
The Beatles wrote many songs that were innovative and inspired new genres of music. “Yesterday,” on the other hand, was pretty old-fashioned. It could have been a hit for Frank Sinatra in the 1940s or Elvis Presley in the 1950s — or for Michael Steven Bublé or Meghan Trainor today. It’s beloved not because it was novel but because it was such a well-written example of a traditional pop ballad.
Paul discussed the origin of “Yesterday.” “‘Yesterday’ came to me in a dream, but at this time it wasn’t just my mom saying a phrase,” he said. “This was a whole tune that was in my head. I had no idea where it came from.
“Best I can think is that my computer [in my head] through the years loaded all these things and finally printed out this song in a dream kind of thing,” the “Silly Love Songs” singer said. “I have to believe that that’s magical. I have no other rational explanation for it.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
A tribute show will honour a music icon from one of the biggest bands in history.
The George Harrison Project, a live music tribute to the Beatles' guitarist, will perform at The Muni Theatre in Colne on March 1, 2025.
The show features some of Harrison's most popular hits from his time with the Beatles, his solo career, and his stint with the Traveling Wilburys.
Alongside John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, Harrison was an integral part of the best-selling music act of all time with 600 million units sold worldwide.
After the Beatles disbanded, he formed the Traveling Wilburys, a supergroup featuring Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty.
Harrison, who died in 2001, also enjoyed a successful solo career, releasing 12 studio albums, including Living In The Material World, Cloud Nine, Brainwashed, and the classic triple album All Things Must Pass.
The 2025 tour of the George Harrison Project aims to authentically recreate some of his best-loved hits.
The show is packed with favourite songs such as All Things Must Pass, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here Comes The Sun, Taxman, My Sweet Lord, and many more.
Source: Tabitha Wilson/uk.news.yahoo.com
The Beatles beefed with each other quite a bit through music. It’s not entirely surprising, either. When you’ve been with the same people in a band for the better part of a decade, it only makes sense to get a little bit toxic about your grievances through song. Without further ado, let’s look at four songs that The Beatles wrote about each other!
1. “How Do You Sleep?” by John Lennon
This is probably the most famous Beatles-related diss track out there. John Lennon wrote this song as a response to a few tracks on Paul McCartney’s solo album, Ram, which Lennon believed were digs at him.
Lennon does not hold back at all with “How Do You Sleep?” Some of the lyrics go beyond tame, poetic jabs at his former bandmate. “You live with straights who tell you, you was king / Jump when your momma tell you anything / The only thing you done was yesterday / And since you’re gone you’re just another day” is aparticularly brutal line.
2. “Sue Me, Sue You Blues” by George Harrison
When McCartney broke off from The Beatles, quite a few legal battles were fought. The first few years after The Beatles called it quits were rife with lawsuits, mostly between McCartney and Lennon. George Harrison, watching it all unfold, wrote the melancholy “Sue Me, Sue You Blues” about the depressing courtroom experiences that McCartney eventually won.
Source: Em Casalena/americansongwriter.com
It’s like the light came on, after total darkness,” is how author Joe Queenan remembers the arrival of Beatlemania in America at the dawn of 1964. He’s not alone in citing the coming of the Fab Four as the true beginning of the 1960s, of the modern era, of a transformative period driven in no small part by the music, words and actions of four young lads from Liverpool. But if you were a teenager in America when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” arrived on Boxing Day 1963, then it’s personal. And if you caught any of the concerts on their first US tour in February 1964, or watched their performances on TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show, or stood outside Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel hoping for an autograph, it’s likely you’ve never forgotten their impact.
That first US tour and the special relationship between The Beatles and America are explored in depth by the new documentary Beatles ’64. “The trip was a dream come true for [them],” says the movie’s producer, Margaret Bodde. “They’d always loved American music, and now they were coming to the home of everything they’d dreamed about.”
But America was going through some issues. The nation had spent a bleak winter mourning its princelike president John F Kennedy, assassinated in Dallas that November. “JFK represented hope, youth, the future,” says the movie’s director, David Tedeschi. “A gloom had descended upon the US. One interviewee told us his girlfriend locked herself in her room for four days after the assassination.” But just as it seemed like this grief would never abate, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” arrived, topping the charts. “From that gloom,” says Tedeschi, “there was this spark of life and optimism and joy.”
Tedeschi’s movie chronicles this cultural moment through the words of surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (and, via archival footage, the late John Lennon and George Harrison) as well as interviews with Beatle heroes such as Smokey Robinson and Ron Isley and the then teenaged Beatlemaniacs like Queenan and Jamie Bernstein (daughter of composer Leonard). Much of the film originates from footage shot during the tour by Albert and David Maysles, later recognised as pioneers of the modernist documentary form via masterpieces like Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens, but only just beginning their careers when Granada TV commissioned them to film the 1964 documentary What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA.
Source: Stevie Chick/the-independent.com
Likely most people have seen iconic footage of the Beatles performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” But how many have seen Paul McCartney during that same U.S. trip feeding seagulls off his hotel balcony?
That moment — as well as George Harrison and John Lennon goofing around by exchanging their jackets — are part of the Disney+ documentary “Beatles ’64,” an intimate look at the English band’s first trip to America that uses rare and newly restored footage. It streams Friday.
“It’s so fun to be the fly on the wall in those really intimate moments,” says Margaret Bodde, who produced alongside Martin Scorsese. “It’s just this incredible gift of time and technology to be able to see it now with the decades of time stripped away so that you really feel like you’re there.”
“Beatles ’64” leans into footage of the 14-day trip filmed by documentarians Albert and David Maysles, who left behind 11 hours of the Fab Four goofing around in New York’s Plaza hotel or traveling. It was restored by Park Road Post in New Zealand.
“It’s beautiful, although it’s black and white and it’s not widescreen,” says director David Tedeschi. “It’s like it was shot yesterday and it captures the youth of the four Beatles and the fans.”
The footage is augmented by interviews with the two surviving members of the band and people whose lives were impacted, including some of the women who as teens stood outside their hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of the Beatles.
“It was like a crazy love,” fan Vickie Brenna-Costa recalls in the documentary. “I can’t really understand it now. But then, it was natural.”
The film shows the four heartthrobs flirting and dancing at the Peppermint Lounge disco, Harrison noodling with a Woody Guthrie riff on his guitar and tells the story of Ronnie Spector sneaking the band out a hotel back exit and up to Harlem to eat barbeque.
The documentary coincides with the release of a box set of vinyl albums collecting the band’s seven U.S. albums released in ’64 and early ’65 — “Meet The Beatles!,” “The Beatles’ Second Album,” “A Hard Day’s Night” (the movie soundtrack), ”Something New,” “The Beatles’ Story,” “Beatles ’65” and “The Early Beatles.” They had been out of print on vinyl since 1995.
Source: wbrz.com
In the mid-1960s, America found itself in the grip of a public health crisis.
“The British Beatles broke out here in New York [like] an epidemic of the German measles,” announced a breathless American TV newsreader. “Unlike measles, Beatles strike teenagers almost exclusively but the symptoms are the same – fever and an itching rash that produces contortions on behalf of the victims.”
It was February 1964 and The Beatles had touched down in the States for the first time. The band’s 14-day trip kickstarted American Beatlemania and the subsequent British invasion of bands including the Rolling Stones and the Dave Clark Five. The Fab Four’s appearance on CBS’s The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday, February 9 broke TV records with a staggering 73 million viewers – more than 40 per cent of the entire US population.
Hysteria swept Manhattan. Around 50,000 fans applied for the 728 places at the Broadway theatre where Ed Sullivan was recorded. The band were pursued everywhere by screaming fans, kept – with limited success – at bay by cordons of arm-linked policemen. Banners appeared saying “Ringo for President”. A national obsession had begun – an obsession that had a lasting impact on people who were there.
“It’s like the light came on,” says American writer Joe Queenan in Beatles ’64, a new Martin Scorsese-produced documentary on Disney+ about the band’s landmark first trip Stateside. It was a revelation for the band too. “This was ‘Give us your huddled masses’. This was to us the land of freedom,” Paul McCartney recalls in the documentary of his expectations of that first trip.
The Beatles appeared on two more Ed Sullivan episodes that February before heading home. That same month I Want to Hold Your Hand started a seven-week stint at number one in America, only to be knocked off by another Beatles song, She Loves You.
Source: James Hall/telegraph.co.uk
Sean Ono Lennon has shared an insight into the relationship between his parents John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
In an interview with PEOPLE Magazine, Lennon spoke about his father ahead of the box set release of ‘Mind Games’, the fourth album by the Beatle first released in 1973.
Sean, who was born in 1975, oversaw the production of the ‘Mind Games’ boxset, and he calls the era during which the album was made as “really terrifying” for both his parents.
This fraught period led to a temporary separation between John and Yoko – however, Sean disagrees with fans who call ‘Mind Games’ a breakup album.
“My mother is this giant mountain in the distance,” he explained to PEOPLE, referring to the ‘Mind Games’ album art, “and dad is this diminutive little man receding into nowhere.”
He added: “His entire life and art was infused with his relationship with my mom,” emphasizing that ‘Mind Games’ is “mostly love songs about her”.
“My dad declared to the world that ‘John and Yoko’ were one word. I think he always had his heart set on her. He was so in love with her. They had a legendary love and I think that this album is infused with that love. You can hear it.”
He also shared that ‘Mind Games’ was an album that saw the couple “stepping away from radical activism a little bit”.
“I think they felt like they didn’t want to be in that world anymore. They realized that it was not a fun road for them and so they wanted to make music that was less directly attacking the establishment and focusing more on peace and love again.”
Sean was recently nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package for the ‘Mind Games’ reissue, for which Sean oversaw new “meditation” mixes.
Earlier this week, the young Lennon revealed that he started making music in order to “fill the void” left by the death of his father.
“I never played music because I was good at it,” he explained. “I lost my father and I didn’t know how to fill that void. Learning how to play his songs on guitar was a way to process the loss with an activity that made me feel connected to him.”
Source: Daniel Peters/nme.com
